ABSTRACT
The discovery of America coincides with the rediscovery and marked interest in Graeco-Latin culture, the history and geography of the ancients. These were sources of information describing the known world and its ethnic diversity for Renaissance man, who also became aware, however, of the misgivings and possible causes which brought about the fall of the great empires. In other words, while on the one hand the writings of the classical historians were of help in circumscribing the difference of the inhabitants of the new lands through analogies with ‘barbarian’ peoples with whom both the Greeks and Romans had compared themselves, on the
1 See Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, [1964], 1971), pp. 111-432; J.H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1970], 1982); Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) and Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Lionello Sozzi, Immagini del Selvaggio. Mito e Realtà nel primitivismo europeo (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2002); Frauke Geweche, Wie die neue Welt in die alte kam (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1986), pp. 149-55; Giuliano Gliozzi, La scoperta dei selvaggi. Antropologia e colonialismo da
other, they exposed Renaissance man to the fears so prevalent in classical culture regarding contamination with the barbarians.2
